Usability testing in Second Life

Since September of last year I enrolled into a post-academic course on Usability Design. And ever since I am paying close attention at the everyday things that I come across during the day: wrongly placed light switches, doors that don't behave as expected, road signs that get confusing, etc. Actually it is very interesting when you are developing products or applications. Now I am not going to play the advocate on why you should do usability design when creating or enhancing products or applications, but once in a while you will definitly see something popping up on my blog about usability, be it user centered design, participatory design, co-creation, interaction design... .

Today I found something interesting on the blog of Adaptive path. These guys where asked by the makers of Second Life, Linden Labs, to make the world more usable for their users. So normaly when you start with usability to find out who your users are and you will try to sit next to them while they perform their tasks in order to learn how they do things and to figure out what they find hard to and how they go round difficult tasks etc. Now the guys from Adaptive Path are not going to really sit next to the user and observe them, the regular way, but they created an avatar that will go around in this world and they will do their usability research from in there, WOW!

If you want to follow their research, subscribe to their blog!